New Release: 1.31.0 (Custom Sidebar)

For a full list of the changes in this release check out the changelog or watch the video below.

In this post I want to focus on the new strategy in this release: the custom sidebar.

Custom Sidebar 😍

This strategy is a pretty big deal for Marvin. As you probably know, we are all about giving you lots of options for your workflow.

But until now the focus was definitely on day planning type workflows.

If you wanted to work directly from lists without planning your day first, you had to go to the Master List to do that.

But the custom sidebar brings your lists to your day view where you have easy access to them.

Great for the GTD workflow

This makes it much easier to work from lists or use a hybrid workflow like GTD where you only schedule a few tasks but mostly work from lists.

Less change for new users

It was important for us to bring this strategy out as many users who come to Marvin have already been using to-do apps for quite some time.

So they are used to having a certain set up and are just looking to benefit from a couple of extra features that are lacking in most other apps. (e.g. nested folders/projects, due & do dates, time tracking, duration estimates…)

Mimic other apps

The custom sidebar makes it much easier to switch as you can basically mimic the set up of any other app you used before. The vast majority of apps have a sidebar on the left with access to different lists. Just like what you can set up with the custom sidebar. 😎

Keeping the sidebar open

If you like working with the sidebar, you can open it and it will stay open on that machine.

If you want to access the menu items in the regular sidebar but the sidebar is open, you can use the keyboard shortcuts. But this is definitely something that is suboptimal right now. We have been thinking of different ways to improve this. As we add more overlays this will become a recurring issue…

What’s coming up

The custom sidebar feature is far from finished. We have lots of plans to add different elements to it besides the simple list button. Stay tuned and let us know what you need from the sidebar!